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One of the most exciting projects you can tackle in image editing software that supports layering—Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Pixelmator, etc.—is to combine images in interesting ways. Whether you’re crafting a surreal piece of art or swapping heads, the process is similar in each program. In this column, you’ll learn how to use Photoshop Elements to combine a photo of an Italian villa and a glass of red wine to create a version of Italy you can drink. Read my Creaticity story at Macworld here.

Watermarking your photos is a fantastic branding opportunity. It can also deter photo theft, and including your URL in the watermark ensures anyone who sees the image online can easily find you and book a session. Lightroom users can create graphic or text-based watermarks quickly and easily, though in Photoshop it takes far more effort. This column teaches you how to make a simple text-based watermark in Lightroom and apply it using the Export command. Read my Creaticity story at Macworld here.

One of the most frequently asked Photoshop questions is how to turn a photo into a painting. Unless you’re a fine artist who’s skilled at digital painting, it can be a daunting task. Fortunately, the mortals among us can use a combination of Photoshop filters to get it done. This technique works especially well on landscape shots, where you don’t have to worry about distorting facial features. This column teaches you how to use Photoshop CS6 or CC 2015, specifically, to create a fairly realistic painting complete with canvas texture...

Grids are a wonderful way to showcase a handful of pictures on your blog or a social media site, though creating a custom grid in Photoshop takes time and skill. What many folks don’t realize is that you can easily create JPEG photo grids in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom’s Print module. In this column, you’ll learn how to create a photo grid and save it as a template...click here to read the full tutorial on Macworld.com

One of the caveats of being a photographer is that you may not be equipped with a lens that’s wide enough to capture the scene you want. When such misfortune strikes, all is not lost; you can take several overlapping shots and then merge them into a panorama using Adobe Photoshop’s Camera Raw plug-in, which comes with Photoshop. (The steps are nearly identical for creating a pano in Lightroom.) Click here to read the full tutorial on Macworld.com.

When it comes to showing off your pictures and videos, nothing beats a great slideshow. Seeing your digital memories overtake your entire screen, set in motion through smooth animations and transitions, complete with background music, is a uniquely personal cinematic experience. Happily, the Photos application makes creating slideshows a snap both on your Mac and on your iOS devices. We’re not talking slideshow projects, wherein you spend hours crafting every single slide, oh heck no.

Not all photos are perfect. It’s natural to have good ones and bad ones, especially in digital photography where you can take as many photos as you want with no guilt involving the cost of film and development. If you’re old enough to remember shooting in film, you probably tossed only the truly terrible shots. You then (likely) left the mediocre ones in the envelope you got from the photo lab, and you (probably) forgot about them. Only the best shots made their way out of the envelope and into a physical album.

Photoshop CC is ideal for creating promotional video pieces, portfolio-based slideshows, and sellable videos for your photography business. Best of all, you don’t have to learn another program—you’ll use tools you’re familiar with. In this column, you’ll learn how to create a wedding video by mixing stills, video, and text...click here to read the full tutorial on Macworld.com

For most creatives, music is inextricably intertwined with the creative process. Before we sit down to hammer out a project, many of us pick a playlist that (we hope) will inspire or, at the very least, keep us awake. Steve Jobs, in delivering keynotes on iTunes and the iPod, called music “the soundtrack of our lives” and trumpeted iTunes’ Genius Playlists as a shockingly easy way to discover (or rediscover) music in our collections—after all, many of us own more music than we remember to listen to.